[ros-users] Digital Camera 1394 in ROS?

[Ken Conley]

>From Rosen
>If it makes a big difference for your team that the cameradc1394
>resided on WillowGarage's servers rather than sourceforge's, then I'm
>sure WillowGarage would be happy to host it.

>From  Jack O'Quin
> Ideally, it should be part of the camera_drivers stack, but that's
> another discussion.  :-)

If people in the community are interested in working together to
develop a low-dependency, fully-featured 1394 driver, we're happy to
host it on ros-pkg and provide release support, including getting it
into camera_drivers when it is stable. We're also happy to help people
use it where-ever it lives. The reason it was removed from ros-pkg
earlier was that WG couldn't maintain a driver for a device we weren't
using.

We setup the ros-pkg repository separately from wg-ros-pkg so that it
could be community-owned, rather than the expression of a single
institution. That said, it's always a careful balance; the federated
model of ROS repositories is very important to us. It allows, for
example, people to start building functionality on top of Brown's Nao
and Create drivers, without WG acting as a gatekeeper. We don't want
to be in the position of suggesting that all commonly used packages be
moved to ros-pkg, and we've built tools like rosbrowse and roslocate
so that users don't have to care where a package is stored. Although
duplication can be confusing, it allows better packages to come along
(e.g. Rosen's cameradc1394) and replace one's that aren't being as
well-maintained.

regards,
Ken